The Crunchy Lure of Southeast Asia

Crunching on grilled pig snouts at a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn the other night, I reflected on how far New York has come.

The snouts and I were in Whiskey Soda Lounge Ny, which the chef Andy Ricker opened in August. It serves as a way station where people can nosh and drink and watch Muay Thai highlight reels while waiting for a table at Mr. Ricker’s Pok Pok Ny down the street. Whiskey Soda Lounge is more than that, though.It’s also a gallery of Thailand’s bar snacks, which you almost never see in the United States except at Mr. Ricker’s other Whiskey Soda Lounge, in Portland, Ore.

Along with Khe-Yo, a new Laotian-inspired restaurant in TriBeCa, Whiskey Soda Lounge joins a busy crowd of kitchens turning New Yorkers on to Asian dishes that we might have treated with extreme caution not long ago. New Yorkers will pinch raw tripe in miso between chopsticks at Takashi in the West Village, rip crisp folds of grilled chicken skin from skewers at Hanjan in Chelsea, and line up for the softer morsels of a lamb’s head at the scattered outposts of Xi’an Famous Foods.

Our pain threshold for spice is rapidly climbing, too. Blistering Isan cuisine has been taking over the Thai scene, and incendiary Sichuan food is turning up all over, riding a great orange tide of chile oil.

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Pork jowl red curry from Khe-Yo.CreditRebecca Greenfield for The New York Times

Whiskey Soda Lounge, in the Columbia Street Waterfront District in Brooklyn, feeds the city’s appetites for both spice and novelty. To tell the truth, that pig snout was so leathery that chewing on it was like getting nourishment from an old football. But I dug into the crunchy pig tails and invitingly tender pork tongue beside it on the plate, a constant special, dipping them into a dark and intense sauce called jaew, made from soy, dried chilies and toasted ground rice. Jaew turned up again with deep-fried strips of marinated pork called muu sawan, a sweet, crunchy and irresistible species of jerky.

Offal anchors the tom saep muu, a clay-pot soup in which a vivid hot-and-sour pork broth elevates the blunt flavors of chopped heart, liver and tripe. One spoonful reminds you that the first cook who combined chilies, lemon grass, Kaffir lime, galangal and lime juice deserved a Nobel Prize for aromatic sciences.

The soup and some other spicy dishes are not murderously hot, but they are not meek, either. The dressings on two excellent salads — yam plaa meuk, or squid with tomatoes and celery, and yam het huu nuu khao, tomatoes and scallions with ruffled white mouse-ear mushrooms — had the kind of warmth you feel in your joints, not the kind that makes you want a tongue transplant.

There are gentler dishes, too. A deep-fried Thai analogue to Scotch eggs, khai luuk khoei, comes with a relatively nonincendiary tamarind dipping sauce, although you can crank up the heat with bits of toasted dried chilies. One of Mr. Ricker’s most lovable hits, the Vietnamese-style chicken wings marinated in fish sauce and garlic, can be ordered spicy or less spicy, and neither version is as fierce as the kind you’d find in a sports bar.

Drink a cocktail if spiciness becomes an issue. Drink a cocktail in any case, because the ones at Whiskey Soda Lounge, like Pok Pok Ny, are fun and refreshing, and because the food almost demands it. Few items, except for maybe the wings, are substantial enough to be main courses. Still, you can easily put together a satisfying meal out of a few snacks, a salad and divots of sticky rice. It isn’t a going-out-to-dinner kind of night, but it makes a great field trip with one or two other bar-stool travelers.

Khe-Yo, opened in July by the chef Marc Forgione and Soulayphet Schwader, one of his longtime cooks, works the other way around. It’s easy to navigate the menu, with appetizers and main courses heavy on animal protein serving as recognizable landmarks. But while much of the food is very appealing, not all of it makes you feel as if you’ve left home.

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Deep-fried eggs in tamarind sauce from Whiskey Soda Lounge Ny.CreditRebecca Greenfield for The New York Times

The most intriguing flavors hide out in Khe-Yo’s sauces. Grilled black bass that comes to the table with its blackened head staring up like a totem is ordinary until you wrap it in lettuce with a funky, salty jam of tamarind and peanuts. This makes it great. A similar transformation happens when you dip the sesame beef jerky in a thick paste of assorted dried smoked chilies pounded with galangal. The condiment is as dark and glossy as shoe polish, and the peppers contribute both fruitiness and spice that make it wonderfully complex.

Meals at Khe-Yo always begin with sticky rice in a bamboo basket, along with two sauces. One is an eggplant mash, with the funky, salty taste of fish sauce. The other is called bang-bang sauce, fresh red chilies and cilantro pounded in a mortar with lime juice and fish sauce. Its genuine heat can improve some of the underspiced dishes you might run into later on, like the excessively mild-mannered laap salads (the one with sliced duck breast and braised and fried tongues is the most compelling) and the lackluster grilled chicken. It doesn’t help the meek papaya salad, though, which needs more chilies before it leaves the kitchen.

Servers invariably described the sticky rice and sauce combo as “our bread and butter service.” This hand-holding feels superfluous for New York in 2013, as does the repeated instruction to wrap food and herbs in lettuce to “create your own perfect bite.” The cooking of Laos is rare in the city, to be sure, but certain dishes and ingredients overlap with those of northern Thailand next door, and at this late date the lettuce wrap probably needs no introduction.

A highly skilled cook with a sharp eye for ingredients, Mr. Schwader was born in Laos and moved to Kansas with his family when he was 3 years old. Right now his menu is a little more timidly westernized than it needs to be, but his kitchen may become bolder as he gets a sense of how far New Yorkers are willing to go.

Meanwhile, diners hungry to try a few Lao dishes in unreconstructed form can go a few blocks south to Mangez Avec Moi at 71-73 West Broadway, (212) 385-0008. Its name isn’t promising, nor is its “authentic pan-Asian cuisine” tagline. But after 4 p.m., the chef, Jeannie Ongkeo, sends out a short Lao menu.

Her papaya salad hummed with fresh chilies and fermented seafood, and her nam kao, a crispy rice salad with shredded coconut, had a taut balance of hot, sour, salty and sweet. My favorite was “or stew,” a murky bowl of slippery mushrooms and eggplant cooked with Kaffir lime, lemon grass and branches of fresh dill. It was the first time I’ve tasted flavors quite like it, but I hope not the last.